U2 SPY PLANE PROGRAM CIA FILES

270 pages of CIA files covering the U2 spy plane program, archived on CD-ROM. Files are from the contents of a 333 page 1998 previously entirely secret report on the history of the U2 spy plane program.

This report contains a comprehensive and authoritative history of the CIA's manned overhead reconnaissance program, which from 1954 to 1974 developed and operated the U2 and the A-12 OXCART. It describes not only the program's technological and bureaucratic aspects, but also its political and international context. The authors tell an engrossing story, the struggle between the CIA and the US Air Force to control the U2 and A-12 OXCART projects. The report reveals how the manned reconnaissance program confronted problems that still beset successor programs today.

The report is based upon both full access to CIA records and extensive classified interviews of its participants. The CIA's historians have found records that were nearly irretrievably lost and have interviewed participants whose personal recollections gave information available nowhere else.

Subjects include: The history of high attitude reconnaissance, development of the U2, Soviet, Middle East and Latin American surveillance operations.